Dispatch Concerts Setlist

Dispatch is an American indie folk band. They were formed in 1996 in Middlebury, Vermont. The founding members were lead singer Chad Urmston (born in 1976 in Sherborn, Massachusetts), guitarist Brad Corrigan (1974, Denver, Colorado), and bassist Pete Heimbold (1975).

In the early 1990’s, two bands, "Hermit Thrush" and "Woodriver Bandits", merged into one acoustic band in Vermont. Originally called “One Fell Swoop”, they changed their name to “Dispatch” in 1996. Their line-up was made up of three students from the local Middlebury College. While they performed their very first Dispatch concert show in Durham, North Carolina in 1996, they performed in venues around their campus in Vermont for the upcoming years after that. They put out music in a wide variety of genres, including acoustic folk-rock, reggae, and even funk, while gaining a sizeable following of college kids in the area.

After graduating from college, the band decided to relocate to Boston, Massachusetts for a wider market for their music. It worked to some extent: while they failed to land a contract with a label, they kept doing popular live Dispatch concert shows (in which, interestingly, all band members kept switching instruments multiple times). Also, their music was widely shared on the peer-to-peer file sharing sites like Napster.

They put out their self-produced debut album back in 1996, titled “Silent Steeples”. They released 3 more albums between 1997 and 2000, all of those were self-produced as well, but Universal picked up their distribution afterwards. None of these records gained any significant commercial traction.

In 2002, the band announced their official break-up due to rising tensions between the members. They scheduled one last farewell Dispatch concert show at the Hatch Shell in Boston in July 2004. Since then, Dispatch has been breaking up and reuniting on and off for over a decade. They have even released 4 more studio albums since. The latest new Dispatch album came out in May 2021, with the title “Break Our Fall”.

The biggest hits in the Dispatch setlist to date are “Elias” (1996), “Flying Horses” (also 1996), and “Only the Wild Ones” (2017). Currently, Dispatch’s line-up is made up of just two of the three co-founders, multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Chad "Chetro" Urmston and Brad "Braddigan" Corrigan.